


Words with friends

by Devolucao



Category: All New X-Factor
Genre: Bilingual Character(s), Code Switching, Gen, Pietro Swears, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 17:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2701310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devolucao/pseuds/Devolucao
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pietro has a few choice words to say about Remy LeBeau.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words with friends

"What's this?" Pietro asks.

Remy, his nose buried in what looks like a sheaf of financial papers, mutters, "Nunya."

"What's that?"

"Nunya damn bidness."

Doug walks past on his way to the common area, coffee cup in one hand, cereal bowl in the other. He scowls at Remy and shakes his head. Lunchtime at Serval Industries, and he wants no part in any of this. "You know, he's been waiting to use that line on you. Just sitting in the middle of the kitchen like that...."

"I know."

It's funny. No, it's baffling, Lorna says, how they haven't tried to kill one another in earnest by now. How Remy even tolerates him is a mystery, she says. 

Pietro laughs so hard he nearly drops a paring knife. "Tolerate me? Tolerate _me_?"

"You two are like oil and vinegar," she says, shaking a bottle of salad dressing. "It shouldn't work, but somehow...."

He sets the knife down carefully, and pops the edge of one nicked digit in his mouth. "I enjoy vinegar," he says, blood like iron on his tongue; like poison. 

"Honey, you are the vinegar."

Pietro, who finds other people infuriating, aggravating, aggrieving...that's not irony, his ex-therapist might say, but projection. Other people are not the problem. Remy is not and never has been the problem. Remy is guiltless. It is Pietro who pokes, Pietro who is the shit-stirrer. It is Pietro who finishes their arguments with 'Mom always did like you best,' and Pietro who gets slapped by Lorna for never knowing where the line is. 

Funny enough, Pietro likes Remy; even, and especially when he's being a sour apple, which is always anymore. 

(Me, ahyain cranky, he'd say, y'all jus annoyin.)

This is Remy once you've scraped away the facade. Remy without his armor is like a hermit crab without its shell. He is a raw, wounded thing. All he seems to want is to curl up someplace--perfectly under foot, mind--and not be bothered. If you leave food out for him, he'll eat it; but if you try to touch him, he shrinks away. These days, he hangs around and mopes like a storm cloud covered in cat hair, stinking of coffee and nicotine until you just want to shake him.

But he adores Remy, he does. Clint hates his ass, and no, that is not too strong a word. Neither of those words are too strong for whatever this whole package--with the accent and the face is. His sign for Remy is a dismissive hand-wave, like showing somebody the mess they've left, and how he's not going to be the one to clean it. He'd introduced them--years ago, at a wedding reception--not out of the simple goodness of his heart, but in a last ditch act of self preservation.

Because he could not read a lick of what Remy was saying. Every third or fourth word, maybe, but to him the rest was just blee-blah. Maybe some kind of redneck, some kind of French. He wasn't sure. All Clint knew was, this was how fights tended to happen around him, and he at least wanted to wait until the cake. After cake, he promised nothing. He said Crystal would understand.

'I'll make it up to you, I swear. Just--' He gave a helpful shove in Remy's direction and hissed, 'talk to him.'

As if Pietro had nothing better to do than be Clint's buffer all night. Talk shit in Romanian and play innocent--say something disgusting about somebody's mother, always a crowd pleaser, or tell them all to eat horse-cock from a cow's ass--and in the ensuing chaos of everyone trying to murder each other, Clint would make good his escape. Yes, yes, he wanted cake alright. Don't worry about it. 

'A haunt, is that like a curse?'

'Mais no, sha, hont. Like hont a vous-autres! Shame on you.' 

Remy's smile, in those days, could have powered a generator. He spoke a lot with his hands: the right to his heart and the left free for emphasis. Clint called it a feint. 'Me, I got caught swearin' out backa church one toime, da preacha come by give me the hont, say you oughta know betta, T. Remy.' 

A nod from Clint, one grifter to another, and he'd hissed again in Pietro's ear. 'It's all calculated. No-one under fifty even sounds like that anymore.'

Talk shit in Cajun and play innocent, meanwhile, he's boosting your watch. 

He'd laughed. 'Een no cackalatin, sha. Ma marraine, she had the real thick accent.' He nodded at the drink in his hand. Jim Beam, the good stuff, with ice. 'It's true, though, you don't hear much of that anymore. It's more Americanized in a lot of places these days. You know, they stop teachin it, pretty soon it's gonna die out.' 

This might have been a gaff, a kernel of sentiment, strategically deployed, but the uncomfortable silence that followed was genuine. Pietro didn't know what to say. Talk shit in Romanian, ask him about his grandparents? Ask him if his house had ever been firebombed. Ask him if he'd ever been beaten for speaking French in public. Had a bottle smashed over his head, or taken food from a dumpster. 

'So, t’es parent avec vous-autres?' 

Clint made a sort of half-nod, half head shake. 'I--what?'

'T'es parent avec vous-autres. How y'all related?'

'We're not,' Pietro volunteered, helpfully reeling Clint back in by his sleeve. 

'Well,' said Remy, 'You sure acklike family. Where you from? Wheyat?' 

'Transia' 'Iowa'

'Wheyat Strangea?' 

'Sorry?'

'I say wheyat? Wheyat?' And here, precisely, was the thing Clint told him to look out for. Pietro's cue. 

'Transia, pulă mea. Este o tara mica invecineaza România1.' Talk shit in Romanian, smile, and watch his face scrunch up. 'Very lovely this time of year.'

'Pulă mea? Wheyat?'

'No, no, puleasca meu2\--' 

'-- o tara mica invecineaza România.3'

'Da.'

The look Wanda gave them all from across the parlor could have peeled paint.

That would be the last year he and the rest of the Avengers were officially welcome at Xavier's, and the last time Pietro wore a wedding ring. 

(Toi, mon christ! I don't know what you say, but Pietro, you goin straight to hell.)

He tells Pietro this regularly. Either he's going to hell, or about to catch something, because Remy's a good Catholic boy who never ever swears, except for the one time out back of the church. An ass is an animal; it's in the bible, and you can say it on tv. They say dick on tv, mais no, he'd never ever use those words on a live press confidence. Which they do broadcast in Strangea, and does Pietro talk that way in front of his daughter? No? Bullcrap. 

Remy is muttering piss and bullcrap and tu pizda mamei tale--for which there are no words in his sainted mother tongue--right now at his calculator, and if Pietro's not mistaken, he's wearing the same clothes he'd worn yesterday; drinking from a coffee mug that has never seen a sponge; stretching over the back of the sofa with his unwashed body, and just being a general disgrace. C'est une hont.

He has not slept and therefor does not care, and Pietro finds this ever so charming. He asks, "Could you maybe not do whatever this is in your apartment?" Fais do-do, he almost says, like one might shoo away a child. "Do you want me to get out the Ferbreeze?" 

A sleepy lip-smack. Remy's not moving. 

"Right," says Pietro. "If I'm vinegar, he's cat urine, and this is why the couch always smells."

Finally, a shout from Remy--signs of life, at last. "Keep dat up, Imma pass you a slap."

Pietro levels a pepper mill by way of pointing. "Pass me one, I'll pass it right back."

Lorna says to quit poking him. Rather, quit pulling on each other's pig-tails and just get a room already. 

It's not that he wishes to quarrel. "And what's wrong with this one?" He pokes because it's easy. He pokes because it's fun, and he pinches because he's bored. Because it's the one thing anymore that still seems to get a rise out of Remy, out of any of them.

Lorna mouths something at him over her salad; something crude; something to do with farming implements. 

"Lawn! That's your brother you talkin to."

"Lorna, really."

"She cross a line. You agree she cross a line?"

He's shouting for Doug's benefit, and from the other room a distant yell: keep Doug out of this, thanks.

She resumes eating, unruffled. "Like oil and vinegar...oh, and Pietro, when you're done two-fisting that pepper mill, would you mind passing it over?"

To hell. They're all going straight to hell.

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: changed a swear or too without changing the joke; now including special characters!
> 
> 1Transia, my dick! It's a small country bordering Romania.
> 
> 2your/my tiny dick--*
> 
> 3*--[sic]you get the idea.
> 
> Da: yes  
> Marraine: Grandmother  
> Wheyat: where you at/where's it at  
> Sha: cher  
> Tois, mon Christ: Jesus Christ/oh my god/etc.  
> Fais do-do: go to sleep/go take a nap  
> Mais: but, well


End file.
